onsistence--the connected and coherent habits, the preference of
equable to violent enjoyment, the abiding capacity to prefer, if
required, the future to the present, the mental pre-requisites without
which civilisation could not begin to exist, and without which it would
soon cease to exist even had it begun. The primitive man, like the
present savage, had not these pre-requisites, but, unlike the present
savage, he was capable of acquiring them and of being trained in them,
for his nature was still soft and still impressible, and possibly,
strange as it may seem to say, his outward circumstances were more
favourable to an attainment of civilisation than those of our present
savages. At any rate, the pre-historic times were spent in making men
capable of writing a history, and having something to put in it when it
is written, and we can see how it was done.

Two preliminary processes indeed there are which seem inscrutable.
There was some strange preliminary process by which the main races of
men were formed; they began to exist very early, and except by
intermixture no new ones have been formed since. It was a process
singularly active in early ages, and singularly quiescent in later
ages. Such differences as exist between the Aryan, the Turanian, the
negro, the red man, and the Australian, are differences
greater--altogether than any causes now active are capable of creating
in present men, at least in any way explicable by us. And there is,
therefore, a strong presumption that (as great authorities now hold)
these differences were created before the nature of men, especially
before the mind and the adaptive nature of men had taken their existing
constitution. And a second condition precedent of civilisation seems,
at least to me, to have been equally inherited, if the doctrine of
evolution be true, from some previous state or condition. I at least
find it difficult to conceive of men, at all like the present men,
unless existing in something like families, that is, in groups avowedly
connected, at least on the mother's side, and probably always with a
vestige of connection, more or less, on the father's side, and unless
these groups were like many animals, gregarious, tinder a leader more
or less fixed. It is almost beyond imagination how man, as we know man,
could by any sort of process have gained this step in civilisation. And
it is a great advantage, to say the least of it, in the evolution
theory that it enable